Virginia Woolf’s Influential Forebears [electronic resource] : Julia Margaret Cameron, Anny Thackeray Ritchie and Julia Prinsep Stephen /
Dell, Marion.author.
Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears reveals under-acknowledged nineteenth-century legacies which shaped Woolf as a writing woman. Marion Dell identifies significant lines of descent from the lives and works of Woolf's great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the writer she called aunt, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen.
Description based upon print version of record.
Covers; Contents; Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; Family Tree; Introduction: 'Born into a Large Connection'; 1 'And Finally Virginia': Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen and Woolf's Constructs of her Ancestry; Pattledom; Woolf's problematic response to her past; Woolf, Cameron, Stephen and Ritchie; Interconnections: Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen; Woolf's narratives of Cameron, Ritchie and Stephen; 2 'Knocking at the Door': Heredity, Legacy and Transition in Night and Day; 'Knocking at the door': Ritchie and border crossings; Literary transformations; Generic ambivalence in Night and Day
Continuities and porous boundariesGenetic legacies; Inherited roles for women; Life-writing; A large connection; Ambivalence, liminality and Woolf's 'third space'; 3 'The Transparent Medium': Anny Thackeray Ritchie; Daughters of educated men; Ritchie's achievements; Woolf's apprenticeship; Lines of influence from Ritchie's essays; 'A very feminine kind of writing'; Writing Lives; Lines of descent from Ritchie's novels; Ritchie's proto-modernism; Crafting memories; Woolf's obscuration of Ritchie's legacies; Woolf's covert acknowledgement of Ritchie: the trope of the door
4 'Take my lens. I bequeath it to my descendents': Julia Margaret CameronCameron's legacy; 'The Searchlight': genesis; Cameron and Woolf: recontextualisation, imaginative retelling and fictionalised auto/biography; Ritchie as 'transparent medium' between Cameron and Woolf; Woolf's representations of Cameron; Woolf's suppression of Cameron's achievements; Blurring boundaries: Cameron's influence in Woolf's work; Public and private spheres; Photograph albums: visual auto/biographies and family histories; Woolf's visual inheritance: identity, perspective and angles of vision
Cameron's proto-modernism: commonalities with WoolfWoolf's use of the visual: lines of influence; Cameron, Stephen and Woolf: arresting beauty; 5 'Closer than any of the living': Julia Prinsep Stephen; Constructs of Stephen; The Angel in the House; Stephen's achievements: the 'real' woman; Stephen's writing and its influence on Woolf; Stephen's atheism and philanthropy; Stephen's mentorship of the young apprentice; Stephen's legacies: laughter and gossip; The absent mother; Woolf's engagement with the Angel in the House; The Angel, photography and ways of seeing
Retrieving the lost mother: invisible presencesLiving life through from the start: reimagining Stephen; 6 'Let us be our great grandmothers': Heredity and Legacy in The Years; Recreating family histories: The Years and A Sketch of the Past; Resurrecting Julia Stephen; The Years and Night and Day; Street music and echoes of Ritchie; Yorkshire roots; Recovering family histories: Woolf and Ethel Smyth; Endings and continuities; Julia Margaret Cameron: the continuing influence of the visual; Cycles, liminality and Woolf's 'third space'
Conclusion: Invisible Presences' and 'Transparent Mediums': Virginia Woolf's Nineteenth-Century Legacies
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears reveals under-acknowledged nineteenth-century legacies which shaped Woolf as a writing woman. Marion Dell identifies significant lines of descent from the lives and works of Woolf's great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the writer she called aunt, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen.
British literature.
Literature, Modern—20th century.
Literature—History and criticism.
Fiction.
British and Irish Literature.
Twentieth-Century Literature.
Literary History.
Fiction.